Night.

* Glenn Beck, lunatic, openly calls for secession.

You can't convince me that the Founding Fathers wouldn't allow you to secede.

The Constitution is not a suicide pact, and if a state says: `I don't want to go there, because that's suicide, they have a right to back out. They have a right -- people have a right to not commit economic suicide...

...Texas says go to hell, Washington, which by the way has been said before. I believe it was Davey Crocket...it's about time that somebody says that again.

He's riffing off some similarly histrionic language from Texas Gov. Rick Perry. When is Fox going to pull the plug on this guy?

* New York joins the future: Gov. David A. Paterson on Thursday will announce plans to introduce legislation to legalize same-sex marriage, according to people with knowledge of the governor’s plans.

* Roasted Peanuts: a blog devoted to the best of classic Peanuts. Via MeFi, which points one I'm rather fond of.

* Barack Obama, great president or greatest president? The president recently sent a video praising Chicago in its bid to hold the 2016 Summer Games. Now he has endorsed the United States’ effort to hold the World Cup of soccer either in 2018 or 2022.

* After two years of work of collecting, scanning, and tagging, the Government Comics Collection at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln library has gone live. This digital collection features "comic books affiliated with state and federal U.S. government agencies, as well as the UN and the EU (and a couple from Canada and one from Ghana)" and includes comics and art by Will Eisner, Scott Adams, Hank Ketcham ("Dennis the Menace Takes a Poke at Poison"), and more.

On Guantánamo: Matt Yglesias has a great post summing up the various absurd turns the Guantánamo debate has taken since Obama has taken office. For me it begins and ends with the new 'supervillain' line, the notion that the people currently imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay are so cunning and all-powerful that we dare not trust them to any domestic prison for fear that they will somehow escape, Joker-like, and run amuck.



I think it's time to start bringing that "reality-based community" line back.

"I've got this thing and it's [expletive] golden, and, uh, uh, I'm just not giving it up for [expletive] nothing. I'm not gonna do it. And, and I can always use it. I can parachute me there."

I've been away from the computer all day, so I'm only finding out about the Blagojevich madness now. Who tries to openly sell a Senate seat? You sell that thing quietly, under the radar. Use codes. Geez. Blagovich now joins the elite cadre of four out of the last five Illinois governors who have been indicted or convicted—and I thought New Jersey politics were corrupt.

Good luck in 2016, governor. And good on Rahm, if he did tip the feds off, though in his position Blagovich was crazy to expect anything else from the incoming chief of staff.

More everywhere.

One of Ezra Klein's readers has too much fun with the craziest yet of the wingnut Obama Birth Certificate conspiracy theories: that Obama is really and secretly the son of (get this) Malcolm X.

Want proof? Here's your evidence.



Case closed.

I'm pretty sure the 'nuts got the idea for this from this post on Blind Item claiming that Usher is secretly the illegitimate son of Ben Vereen.

I read Gawker too, wingnuts.